YouTube Playlist Downloader
Paste the link of a public playlist and download its contents as a list: titles, video links, channel names, publication dates and lengths. Save it as a spreadsheet, as JSON or as a plain list of links. This tool exports information about the playlist; it does not download the videos themselves.
- Encrypted connection
- No sign-up
- Free to use
How to use YouTube Playlist Downloader
- Open the playlist on YouTube and copy its address, which contains “list=”.
- Paste it into the field and select Get the playlist.
- Review the table of videos.
- Download the list as CSV, JSON or a text file of links.
YouTube Playlist Downloader features
Complete list
Position, title, link, video ID, channel, publication date and length for each entry.
Three formats
CSV for Excel and Google Sheets, JSON for scripts, and a plain text file with one link per line.
Totals
Number of videos, total running time and a count of private or deleted entries.
Official data
Read through the YouTube Data API or YouTube’s public playlist feed, not by scraping pages.
Safe spreadsheets
Titles that start with a formula character are neutralised so that a spreadsheet does not execute them.
Honest scope
Lists only. No video or audio is downloaded, and the page says so.
When to use YouTube Playlist Downloader
- Keeping a backup of a playlist in case videos are removed.
- Sharing a reading-list style overview of a course or series.
- Calculating the total length of a course.
- Moving a list of videos into a spreadsheet, a notes app or another service.
YouTube Playlist Downloader FAQ
Does this download the videos?
No. It downloads the list of what is in the playlist. Saving the video or audio files of other people’s uploads is not allowed by YouTube’s terms of service, except through the download feature of YouTube’s own apps. To watch offline, use YouTube Premium.
Why do I only get 15 videos?
Without access to the YouTube Data API, the only official source is YouTube’s public feed, which lists the 15 most recent entries of a playlist. When the site owner configures an API key, the full playlist is listed, up to 500 videos.
Why can it not read my playlist?
The playlist has to be public or unlisted. Private playlists, “Watch later”, “Liked videos” and automatically generated mixes are visible only to their owner, or are different for every viewer, and cannot be exported.
What are “private or deleted” entries?
Videos that were in the playlist and have since been removed or made private. YouTube keeps a placeholder without a title. They are counted and left out of the list.
How do I open the CSV file?
Double-click it to open it in Excel, or import it into Google Sheets with File → Import. The file is UTF-8 encoded with a marker that lets Excel display non-Latin titles correctly.
Is there a limit on playlist size?
Up to 500 videos per request, to stay within YouTube’s daily quota. The page tells you when a list was cut.
A playlist is a list, and lists can be exported
A YouTube playlist is an ordered collection of references to videos. The videos themselves stay where they are, on their owners’ channels. That distinction matters for what can legitimately be done with a playlist. Its structure, the list of titles and links, is public information that YouTube makes available to software. The media it refers to is not available for download.
Exporting the list has practical value. Videos disappear: creators delete them, accounts are closed, items are made private. A playlist then shows “Deleted video” and nothing else, and the owner of the playlist no longer knows what was there. A dated export with titles and channel names is the only record. It also turns a playlist into something that can be searched, sorted, annotated and shared outside YouTube.
The data comes from YouTube’s interfaces for developers. The Data API returns the entries of any public or unlisted playlist page by page, and a second request supplies the length of each video. Sites without an API key can still read the Atom feed that YouTube publishes for every playlist, which is limited to the latest fifteen entries.
A word on file formats. CSV is the right choice for spreadsheets; each row is a video and each column a property. JSON keeps the same data in a structured form for programs. The text file is simply one link per line, convenient for pasting into a document or another tool that accepts a list of addresses.